Dec 16, 2009

The Pit and the Pendulum | Psychoanalysis of the Narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum"

In this essay we shall attempt to perform two separate, but not unrelated, tasks. First we shall use the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud to explicate the bizarre and surreal nature of events and emotional states described in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." In doing this we shall demonstrate that the character of the narrator and the events which transpire in the tale can be consistently understood by viewing them in the light of a central doctrine of Freudian psychoanalysis, which Freud himself describes in an opening passage of his paper "Sexuality in the Aetiology of...